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“... Richard Florida​ has been having second thoughts. In 2002 he argued in The Rise of the Creative Class that the future of advanced economies lay not in manufacturing but in high-skilled areas of the service sector: engineering, design, fashion, media, finance, medicine and law. The industrial revolution had largely originated in cities, but in the 20th century, industry started to move away from them ...”

“... A.J. Ayer, says Ben Rogers, had a ‘pampered upbringing, even by Edwardian standards’. He suffered much at prep school, then went to Eton, where he suffered less and got over it. The next move, to Christ Church, was painless. Oxford gave him Gilbert Ryle as his tutor and appointed him to a lectureship before he graduated ...”

“... as young as two. Give it a child at an impressionable age, and it will have a customer for life. Ben Rogers is aware of food’s emotional power, and of its ability to create bonds between people. In Beef and Liberty, he has written a whimsical, amusing, informative book about the English and their favourite meat. Long before the phrase ‘you are what ...”

“... haven’t had a very good year. On 4 January, the first working day of the new millennium, Ben Rogers wrote in the Guardian that he was ‘surprised to wander into the philosophy section’ of their Gower Street store: not very surprising behaviour for a philosopher, you might think, except that he discovered ‘someone’ had ‘divided the whole ...”

“... Sultan Qaboos, died on 10 January, Prince Charles, Boris Johnson, the current defence secretary, Ben Wallace, and the chief of the armed forces, General Sir Nick Carter, were quick to fly out. The new defence accord is surely the reason. Qaboos had ruled for half a century and was treated as a benign head of state by UK governments and the media – if not ...”

“... than ten thousand words a day for the Herald Tribune. Celebrities who dropped by included Ginger Rogers, Moss Hart, Lynn Fontanne, Jack Dempsey, Robert ‘Believe-it-or-not’ Ripley, Elsa Maxwell and Jack Benny. They were in court less because of Hauptmann than because of Lindbergh, the biggest celebrity of them all. It is a sign of the passing of time that ...”

“... for re-election; and then he insisted on Israel’s total evacuation of Sinai in 1957, even though Ben Gurion had claimed that it was not part of Egypt and that it ‘had been liberated’ by the Israelis. Israel, of course, has not controlled every move in America’s Middle Eastern policy. Some – but not all – administrations try to escape that control ...”

“... John Heywood, whom Harington greatly admired, but the most spry anticipate the sharpness of Ben Jonson, which is probably why Jonson was keen to dismiss them in conversation with William Drummond as ‘but narrations’. His most lastingly popular epigram was ‘Treason doth neuer prosper? What’s the reason?/for if it prosper, none dare call it ...”

“... of her ostentatiously highbrow co-chief. The botched 2017 manifesto, co-authored by Timothy and Ben Gummer, was designed to be a philosophical restatement of Conservative principles, communitarian, interventionist and anti-free market: nothing so menial as an advertisement for a party trying to win an election. The two chiefs of staff took very different ...”

“... a fiercely compartmentalised life, but achieves wholeness on her own terms. The day her husband, Ben, died, she put the house on the market and moved back in with her four sisters. Hadn’t she always said that she had them for talking and Ben for everything else? Her whole generation is contentedly divided, their father a ...”

“... his modest and neglected peer. There are moments, too, in his long relationship with Viking’s Ben Huebsch, but the brightest example, the most sustained retraction of the claws, is reserved for Philip Garland, the brain-damaged son of his long-suffering cousin Peggy. At length and with great care he writes of animals, music and travel, gently encouraging ...”

“... and was running a small department store in Newport, Arkansas belonging to a franchise called Ben Franklin. Walton had grown up in Missouri and attended the state university, then gone on to a clerical job during the war. He married Helen Robson, borrowed some money from her lawyer-banker father, then opened his ...”

“... the obscure and the forgotten. Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning plan their elopement. Samuel Rogers entertains the Gräfin Hahn-Hahn, a romantic novelist who has come to meet her English public and disappoints them by turning out to have false teeth and a glass eye. The painter Benjamin Haydon approaches a crisis in his unhappy career. Browning annoys ...”

“... much detail, and walk-on cameos by ascertainably ‘real’ 1990 guests – John Major, Richard Rogers, Neil Kinnock and, of course, the richly despised Howard Jacobson. Francis Jay gives an impromptu television interview in which, with all the authority of one who has studied deconstruction at Sussex, he dismisses the shortlisted candidates as writers of ...”

“... Starks eventually cycled through a series of small-time college basketball programmes, from Rogers State, where he was on the ‘taxi’ squad (which didn’t suit up for games), to Northern Oklahoma, until he got kicked out for smoking pot in his dorm room. After that he met his future wife and ‘took a minimum-wage, $3.35-an-hour cashier job at a ...”